Yu (Cyrillic)


Yu or Ju is a letter of the Cyrillic script used in East Slavic and Bulgarian alphabets.
In English, Yu is commonly romanized as or. In turn, is used, where available, in transcriptions of English letter , and also of the digraph. The sound, like in French and in German, may also be approximated by the letter.

Pronunciation

Sometimes, it is referred to as "Iotated U" because it is a so-called iotated vowel, pronounced in isolation as, like the pronunciation of in "human". After a consonant, no distinct sound is pronounced, but the consonant is softened. The exact pronunciation of the vowel sound of in Slavic languages depends also on the succeeding sound. Before a soft consonant, it is, the close central rounded vowel, as in 'rude'. Before a hard consonant or at the end of a word, the result is a back vowel, as in "pool".

History

Apart from the form I-O, in early Slavonic manuscripts the letter appears also in a mirrored form O-I. It is the latter form that is probably the original, precisely displaying the Greek combination omicron-iota. At the time that the Greek alphabet was adapted to the Slavonic language giving rise to the Cyrillic alphabet, it denoted the close front rounded vowel in educated Greek speech. The close front rounded vowel does not appear in East Slavic. See [|above].
There was another way for it to lead to the modern form. By the analogy to several 'iotated' letters Ѥ, Ꙗ, Ѩ and Ѭ, the ancient ligature Uk / possibly had its iotated form /.
The iotated big Yus merged itself to in East Slavic languages.
is the Voice Quality Symbol for tracheo-œsophageal speech.

Related letters and other similar characters